Spyware, ransomware, and bots, oh my! A lot of these terms are prevalent on the Internet, but it may seem impossible to know what all these terms mean, and how they actually affect your devices and personal information.
The term, “virus” has been the commonplace word for all malicious software programs for years now; however, a virus is just one type of malicious threat. A virus is classified as a self-replicating piece of malicious code that travels by inserting itself into files or programs. The threats on the cyber landscape have evolved into more than just viruses, and can cause mu...

Ransomware is a form of malware that will lock files on a computer using encryption. Encryption converts files into another format, like a secret code and can only be decoded by a specific decryption key.
Types of Ransomware
Ransomware can present itself in two forms.
Locker ransomware will encrypt the whole hard drive of the computer, essentially locking the user out of the entire system.
Crypto ransomware will only encrypt specific, seemingly important files on the computer, such as word documents, PDFs and image files.
Once the ransomware installs itself, ...

Modern day computer virus origins may surprise you- their goals were not quite the same as they are today.
Early on, viruses had varied utilities and were engineered mostly by people in computer science industries. College students created viruses for research projects in order to help further their studies and fine-tune their coding skills. In addition to research, those students would also construct code to play practical jokes on their classmates. Engineers at Xerox created a computer worm meant to search for idle processes in a computer network. A pair of programmers created a boot...